Sanctuary
by bkwrmnlvnit
Summary: The world forgets what happens here, but the lake remembers. Rated for themes.


_A/N - For Brooke: I hope I incorporated the themes enough and the canon characters can be recognised. Happy Halloween!_

 _Trigger warning for mention of suicide._

* * *

 **I.**

Once upon a time, it is summer, and everything lives.

The lake outside the fences is crystal blue and the wind makes it wave, sends ripples shuddering out over the pond. The sun glints off the water drops into fractured light, shooting and shattering into summer skies that seem to stretch on forever.

She thinks the clouds look like ribbons as she sits on the edge of the lake, skirt bunched up around her legs and toes submerged, splashing lightly in the mirrored sky at her feet. A blue bird soars overhead, and she watches its reflection flash over where her ankle bends into the rest of her leg, and she smiles at the sight.

She breathes in and the lake breathes with her as she smiles and hums and weaves the world around her into a story in a leather journal, a story that she can take with her everywhere, even into the shelters where the government still insists that everybody should hide in case something should happen, in case the seas that rose and swallowed the rest of the world should decide to finish their job and rise up here too, sweeping them all away in a blur of azure ends.

But this lake, it's too quiet to be scheming the way everyone seems to think it does. The world is too calm for her to believe that it could possibly hurt her. She turned sixteen underground, and to her, the air is freedom. When she swallows down each breath, she can taste the openness on her tongue, and she wonders, briefly, what it will be like one day if everyone is right and the lake does rebel and swallow her too. She wonders if it will feel quiet like this. If it will hurt.

(Even if it burns, she'd still take it over another day hiding underground.)

 **II.**

Once upon a time, it is autumn, and everything is dying.

The trees are half green, half gold, alive but dying slowly as a wind sweeps through and sends the leaves flying off, sparking along the ground as they go. They look like little flames as they flicker across the grass, skittering onto the surface of the lake and then staying there, immobile and extinguished. Below the matchstick trees with their shedding sparks, she too stands, immobile and enraged.

Her hands are clenched into tight fists at her side, but they still shake. "It's not fair. We're _kids_. We didn't do anything wrong."

Across from her, he shrugs, hands jammed into his pockets and eyes cast out over the lake. "Doesn't matter. Not to them."

"It _should._ " It should matter that they are scared, that they are young, that they don't want to die. "We weren't even around for that stupid rebellion, and we still get to pay the price, twenty-three of us every year. And now, in two weeks, we have to lose _forty-seven?_ If this is what their idea of fair is, then they can ram it up their ass, because it's _wrong._ "

He snorts. "It's also twice as much fun."

"Yeah, and twice as _stupid,_ " she growls.

He surprises her by laughing. "Anyone ever told you how cute you are when you're pissed off?"

"First of all, I'm not cute, ever, so secondly, _no._ " She glares at him, or tries, but his smile eventually makes her stop, and she just crosses her arms, digging her fingernails into her palms while he keeps watching her with an amused smirk. She shifts on her feet, eyebrows furrowed as she looks at the ground and starts to fidget. It's hard to still be vicious when he's looking at her like it's all such a joke, even if they both know it's not.

He spares her after a few long minutes. "Come on, sweetheart," he says, emphasizing the final word and smirking as she glares. "We can't challenge-"

"-an unarmed opponent to a battle of wits," she finishes, and sighs.

He nods. "And the Capitol is about as unarmed as it gets. So how about we just pretend they don't exist for ten minutes and dance?"

There's another brief pause, and she nods. "Fine." Carefully, she reaches forward, awkwardly trying to arrange herself. Dancing isn't her strong point, and it never has been. "If I step on your feet, it's not my fault. You know I suck at this."

"Yeah, you do," he agrees as he takes her hand. "But I only wear out the bottoms of my feet. You might as well wear out the tops."

She moves to smack him, like always, and he dodges, like always, and then under the swirling leaves, they dance, leaned against each other in a kind of awkwardly understanding tandem, as if they are each the only support the other has. Time passes, and after a while, he snorts quietly. "'They'll be twice as stupid as usual,'" he echoes, laughing a bit. "I like it. I think I'll use that one if I wind up going."

"You better," she replies.

(Two weeks later, they pull his name from the bowl. Six weeks later, he's almost dead, but he's as smart as ever as he sends an axe into the girl from One's head, and seven weeks later, he's still alive. He's back home, jumpy and scared and scarred.

Eight weeks later, she is dead.

At the lake with the burnt out trees and the dead leaves still floating across the surface, he falls to his knees and screams.)

 **III.**

Once upon a time, it is winter, and the world stands frozen.

His voice rings out low and clear through the trees, and she follows the song to its source in the silence he creates with every note. She finds him on the edge of an ice blue mirror, thumbs jammed in the pockets of a worn jacket, and she smiles as she approaches. "Odd song to sing, given circumstances," she says, and he laughs as he turns to greet her.

"You think a song about a dead man's tree isn't appropriate for forest meetings, then?" he asks, a smile in his eyes. "I guess I may have to come up with another one."

"Maybe," she agrees. There is a brief moment that they spend staring at each other before he clears his throat awkwardly.

"Anyway, you didn't come out here so we could talk about hanging people," he says, moving along the shore to where she can see the pairs of ice skates on the ground. "Here." He holds out the smaller of the pairs, and she nods, taking them from his hands and sitting where he motions at the snow packed ground.

There's a comfortable silence between the two of them. Her fingers are only mildly protected by her merchant's gloves, but he wears nothing on his hands and he's still as deft as she is, despite the cold. She supposes that he's probably built up a tolerance to it after living so long in the Seam, but that doesn't make it any less impressive.

Within a few minutes, they're both standing. He looks regal and at ease as he glides around experimentally a few times to verify the integrity of the ice, and she watches in awe as he returns and he gives a nod of confirmation, extending out a hand to her.

Uncertain and unsteady, she follows after him onto the ice, fingers crushing his in a tight grip. She's still very much learning, but he's a surprisingly good teacher, and he never complains when she needs him to hold her hand or help her off her feet. He just smiles, that same good natured smile he always gives everyone, and he gives her hints, time and time again for literally hours. Eventually, she manages a few steady laps around without immediate and lasting agony before her blades catch on each other and she stumbles.

He catches her smoothly before she can hit the ground. "I get this a lot," he jokes, and she shakes her head as he helps her away to the waiting ground so that they can both get ready to sneak back home. While they remove their shoes and replace them, she casts glance after glance at the boy who sits beside her, familiar and kind, unassuming and unafraid as he whistles quietly and mockingjays whistle back.

"Whose ice skates are these anyway?" she asks as she picks at the laces to pull out the knot stuck in them.

His fingers falter briefly, and it's only because she's watching that she notices. His voice gives nothing away. "My sister's," he says.

She looks at him in mild surprise. "I didn't know you had a sister. How old is she?"

"She would be nineteen." His voice is expressionless, lacking its smile for the first time the whole night.

She understands anyway and feels immediately sorry for asking. "Oh. I…"

He shakes his head. Clears his throat. "You don't have to be sorry. Everyone else has already been sorry enough. It won't make her any older though, so there's not a lot of point to it."

"I see." The wind blows faint hintings of snowy dust over the frozen surface of the pond as she watches. "May I ask how she…?"

"Hanging," he responds. "Self-inflicted. Three years ago, after they announced the Quell. She didn't want to be anybody's entertainment."

She reaches over and grabs his hand, squeezing it tightly in her own. "I'm sorry," she says simply.

He doesn't look at her, just shakes his head and narrows his eyes at the shore. "No." His voice is quiet. "She deserved to have a choice."

(They sit in silence for a long while, until he finds words to a different song without rope necklaces. It's a lullaby, and they both let the song take them away to a place where they don't have to sneak away to this ice blue freedom, where children never die and everyone gets to choose.)

 **IV.**

Once upon a time, it is spring, and the world is somehow beautiful.

A girl with dark hair and blue eyes skips along with her brother, both of them singing the words to a lullaby their mother taught them when they were young, both of them laughing. He dares her to run faster and she obliges, chasing him around the blue basin where so many have dreamed and cried and laughed and wondered about the freedom that now is, the freedom they never thought would be. She chases him until they fall down, and they lay laughing on a spot where a man once was torn apart with tears.

Perhaps it is blasphemy, but she doesn't care as she sits and laughs with her brother, as she listens to the quiet whispers of the water as it laps at the shore where her ankles are dipped in it like the toes of some other woman, years and years before, long before she could recall.

(The world forgets what happens here, but the lake remembers.)


End file.
